Indie dev

Previous 1h Prototype challenge

Over the past few weeks I’ve been participating in a challenge every Friday to create a game (usually a prototype) within an hour after receiving a random theme & genre. I’ll be posting about the new challenges I participate in each week, but I’ll also be summarising the challenges I’ve previously done until I’ve caught up with myself. These will usually be spread out between my other posts. Anyways let’s get into it, for this post I’ll cover 2 projects (the first two weeks).

Theme: Hospital Genre: MMORPG

This one was interesting simply because of the genre, I’d never worked on anything with multiplayer features before so this is what I decided to focus on. I work with Unity and they make it incredibly easy to incorporate multiplayer features, after a little research on the internet I managed to find a solution and finished up with this:

It doesn’t look like much but it manages to connect two players through LAN (same connection) or via an internet connection (Online). The players can see each other move and are assigned different colours to differentiate between the two. It uses Unity’s built in networking components & features, it was quite easy to set up and I was very happy to learn how it all worked. Even if I didn’t get a game, I learned something new and it was fun to achieve what I set out to do within the hour.

Theme: CandyLand Genre: Horror

This one was I was very eager to try; horror is one of my favourite genres so this challenge really grabbed my attention. I started by creating a large(ish) play area and created a room prefab I could scatter around the map. I added a few corridors and scaled some rooms to add a little variety to the map. The Idea was the map would be made of candy and you had to collect pieces (like Slender but candy themed).

The problem was I often find Unity too clean and bright for a horror setting, so I spent a lot of my time experimenting with the lighting/fog settings and Unity’s built in visual effects. I found a few visual effects I liked that made the scene look much scarier and placed a camera effect I created over the top to make it look like you were viewing through a camera.

I still had a chunk of my time left so I added the enemy, I recently experimented with Unity’s navigation in a previous project so I knew exactly how to implement it and got to work. The enemy is simply a cube with a trigger to detect the player, he moved between points I’d set up around the map and moved faster when chasing the player (you can escape, if you’re fast enough).

I didn’t manage to get the item collection in the game because I was too busy creating the very simple AI and making the scene look as scary as I could. I’m still very happy with what I achieved and can’t wait to use what I learned in another horror project in the future…